Luis, God, and the One-Eyed Crow

In Memory of Luis Jimenez, 1941—2006
Bobby Byrd

Luis Jimenez used to wear a crow’s head.
The crow had only one good eye.
It happened this way—
The crow was sitting on the top of a dead cottonwood tree.
He was looking at God and God turned around and snatched his eye.
Poor crow.
God tossed the eye into the Rio Ruidoso.
The eye washed down the river until the river disappeared into sand.
So let it be said that the eye that God snatched never got far.
It rotted in the sand somewhere between Hondo and Roswell.
The crow flew up the canyon and sat down in another tree.
The crow suffered but eventually the wound healed.
He lived life as a one-eyed crow in that tree for a long time.
He kept doing his business which was being a crow.
“Life is like that sometimes,” the crow said.
Period.
Then one day the crow died.
Luis found the crow inside a clump of long-stemmed grass.
He shed a tear for the one-eyed crow.
Like the crow, Luis only had one eye.
God had snatched his eye too.
Luis fashioned himself a hat from the head of the crow.
He put the crow hat on his head.
“That’s what artists do,” he said. “We make things.”
Luis was a one-eyed commonsense workingman.
A blue-collar artist.
He kept doing his business.
Like me, Luis was always angry with God.
God in our separate stories was the Father Who Went Away.
Maybe “God” was not the right word.
We didn’t care.
Luis liked to ride off through the scrub cedar on his appaloosa pony.
He liked being alone to admire the way the sun sets.
He had his one eye.
He carried with him his gun and his bow and arrows.
He wanted to shoot God dead if God gave him the slightest chance.
God never gave him the chance.